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When Victims Rule (A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America)
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WHEN VICTIMS RULE,
A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America
Source: JTR Website



19. [Part 1]

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE


         
 "If anything distinguishes American Jews today within the context of American
           society it is the special deference that society accords them." 
       
                                   
-- Charles Liebman/Stephen Cohen, p. 7

           "I have found that being Catholic means having less status than
           being Jewish. I see it in the media, in the newspapers, in the
           intonations; I do not see how one can avoid that feeling or
           sensibility."        -- Michael Novak, [in Stallsworth, p. 71]


           "I'm half Jewish and half nothing."
           (four-year-old boy in an elevator, to his friend), [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 245]

 
           "Too many Jews have turned away from the modern project, from
            the Enlightenment and the idea of progress, to barricade
            themselves in an angry tribalism."  -- Norman Birnbaum, Tikkun,
                                                                     p. 111
 
          "The Jews in America ... have become very powerful as a lobby and
           can afford the luxury of being hypersensitive. Any little thing that
           you say in criticism is seen as a criticism against the people. They
           seem to want to be seen as infallible." 
                                         -- South African Bishop Desmond Tutu,
                                                     Nobel Peace Prize Winner
 
           "When Jews see themselves as superior to all other human beings
            ... they are claiming license to do what is forbidden to others."
                                            -- Yehoshafat Harkabi, former chief of                                                 Israeli military intelligence, p. 180
 
           "I didn't hear that polio was cured today. I heard that a Jewish
           doctor cured polio today." -- Godfrey Cambridge, Black comedian,
                                                               SIMONS, p. 135-136
 
           "[Black Americans have] an envy of the Jewish position and an
           exaggerated notion of their power, which is standard in the
           anti-Semitic imagination." -- Henry Feingold, Jewish scholar, p. 77
 
           "American Jews have exerted an extraordinary impact upon the
           character of the United States."
                                -- Stephen Whitfield, Jewish scholar, [AMERICAN
                                   SPACE, p.20]
 
           "It is all very puzzling. Who are these people, Christians wonder,
            who have moved so rapidly from obscurity to positions of
            prominence, even influence, in American society ... [and] why
            do Jews seek to stick together so much?"
                                  -- Charles Silberman, Jewish scholar, p. 26

     "The period after World War II, especially, was a time of advance.
     Before then Jews had moved into the entertainment field, dominating
     Hollywood, and had begun to move into medicine, the sciences,
     academia, journalism, and cultural life in general. By the 1960s,

     they were disproportionately represented in most professions having to do
     with the creation or dissemination of culture."
                    -- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
                       1982, p. 96
 
           "Jews in America are a power group; is it unreasonable for some
            people to ask whether Jews have too much power?"
                                   -- Jerome Chanes, Jewish scholar, [in Weiss, p. 32]
 
            "We Jews still prepare ourselves to fight the things the world
            plans on doing to us. It ain't true ... Jews are not victims. We are
            the players." -- J. J. Goldberg [in Silverstein, B., p. 5]
 
          
 
 
     
     Transcending religion, race, or any other traditional Judaic reference, modern American Jewry is often described these days as a voluntary (from the perspective of the individual, not the community, which claims Jews by birth to the "community of fate") polity, a secular organizational network with emphasis upon social, educational, economic and political activism.  It is an organization that unifies atheists and the religious, rich and the less affluent, Sephardim, Ashkenazi, and any other self-defined "Jew" within a communal solidarity to Jewish "peoplehood" and its four unifying pillars of Jewish identity: 1) belief in a communal identity of historic persecution and victimhood and the uniqueness of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, 2) belief in the omnipresent threat of an irrational anti-Semitism, 3) allegiance to the modern state of Israel, and 4) a dedication to helping others Jews. 
 
     The secular Jewish polity is a very adjusted model of the old obsolete "kehillah" self-governing organization that the Jewish community in Europe used to mediate with -- and distance itself from -- the surrounding non-Jewish people and cultures. While today's Jewish polity is world's apart in method and structure from the old institution, its purpose for existence today has moved towards what is was in ancient times: Jewish people distinct from, and often at the expense of, others. (Since the late 1960s, there has been a major shift in fundamental American Jewish attitudes: from helping fellow Jews assimilate fully into American mainstream society, to its polar opposite: massive amounts of money raised to support all aspects of  "being Jewish.”) [SINGER, p. 220] The largest and best known expression of this polity is the United Jewish Appeal, an entity that has some 225 "federation'" sub-branches throughout the country. (In 1999, the UJA merged with other groups to form the "United Jewish Communities.") Such organizations claim a supportive base of 95% of all Jews in America. [WOOCHER] (One UJA fundraising brochure summed up its sense of itself by stating that "the programs of [our] agencies ... are not merely organizational endeavors, even 'good works' ... they are expressions of the essential meaning of Jewishness." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 19]) By 1980, 4,600 "key leaders" traveled to Israel that year alone on UJA "missions." [SILBERMAN, p. 198]]
 
     Still other Jewish polity expressions (what Daniel Elazar describes as "government-like institutions" [ELAZAR, p. 217] include B'nai Brith (and its Anti-Defamation League), Haddassah, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Council for Jewish Women, and a variety of overtly Zionist organizations, most linked to the American Zion Federation. The central Jewish lobbying organ for Israel is the American Israel Political Action Committee -- AIPAC. By 1982 Jewish Americans had "no less than 340 national organizations." [KREFETZ, p. 71] More than eighty were expressly Zionist or other pro-Israeli groups. [WAXMAN, p. 134]
 
     This modern American Jewish polity is often noted as a quintessential "civil religion," a secular belief system that elicits deeply-felt allegiance of religious depth and proportion. "It has become a commonplace in recent years," notes Peter Novick, "that Israel and the Holocaust are the twin pillars of American Jewish 'civil religion' -- the symbols that bind together Jews in the United States whether they are believers or nonbelievers, on the political right, left, or center." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 147] (The modern Jewish attachment to Judaism as a formal religion in most of the twentieth century has been weak. A 1971 study revealed that only 17% of American Jews attended religious services more than once a month; this was in comparison to 65% of non-Jews who did so). [FORSTER, p. 128] As in any religion, the secular Jewish polity beliefs are articles of faith. They need not make logical sense to an outside observer; even some of its adherents may recognize -- and struggle to resolve -- various incongruencies, paradoxes, and hypocrisies in its central tenets. As the Random House dust jacket blurb noted for James Yaffe's 1968 volume The American Jews: Portrait of a Split Personality, "no people on earth are more riddled by contradictions than the American Jews." [YAFFE, 1968]
 
     These inconsistencies largely stem from Jewish attempts to rationalize their traditional (and current) notions of their exalted selves as the Chosen People in the context of a modern western society that socializes against such chauvinism, a pan-human perspective that most Jews themselves give public lip service. Jewish reluctance to surrender, however, (whatever form of) their self-perceived hereditary specialness as central to Jewish identity has created for some a lingering moral and psychological dilemma, one that the Jewish polity resolves by dissimulation and/or equivocation, by enforcing the preposterous and paradoxical Jewish myth that it is Jewish chauvinistic exceptionality itself that created the notion of pan-human universality. "[The Jewish polity believes that] America is, after all, created in their [Jewish] image," says Jonathan Woocher, "and in pursuing the civil Jewish version of Jewish destiny, they are merely reinforcing the terms of America's own understanding." [WOOCHER, p. 102]
 
      "Whether Jews define themselves as 'just Jewish,' 'ethnic Jews,' 'nonreligious Jews,' or some other phrase that classified them as more assimilated," noted Gary Tobin in 1988, "most know that they are different from other Americans.... [TOBIN, p. 70] ... For most Jews, there continues to be a 'them' and an 'us,' even though the 'us' is in some ways part of the 'them' ... [TOBIN, p. 73] ... The majority of American Jews continue to struggle to maintain their separate identity." [TOBIN, p. 74] "Despite their strong desire for integration into American society," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1972, "Jews do not, on the whole intermarry and do maintain themselves apart. How to resolve this contradiction is one of the major dilemmas of Judaism in America." [GLAZER, p. 10]
 
     This "contradiction" is clearly manifest in the very principles of Jewish identity that are diametrically opposed to the founding principles of Americanism. As Adam Garfinkle observes:
 
          "The principle of individualist equality that flows from American
           sacred texts and the American experience cannot be reconciled with
           the hierarchical, communal principle that flows from halakhah,
           Jewish religious law. Many try and some claim success, but
           'success' is mere illusion. Most American Jews have two religions
           the way some men have one wife and one mistress, or some women
           one husband and one lover. It is a condition that can be managed,
           learned from, even enjoyed, some times for long periods. But it can
           never be brought to true reconciliation." [GARFINKLE, p. 4]

     After a 1950s survey of American Jews, researcher Joseph Adelson noted the "confusion" some Jews had in grappling with stereotypes about Jews that seemed to them to be true, all centering on the contradictions of Jewish identity and "self-hatred" (i.e., self-criticism):

      
"It should be emphasized that the nonauthoritarian [a 1950s-era term for the       
       non-prejudiced] are not free from conflicts and confusions about being Jewish;
       indeed, they frequently seem more disturbed than do the authoritarian [i.e.,
       "prejudiced" Jews who put stock in some stereotypes], in part because of a
       lesser rigidity of defense and in part because their political beliefs are often at
       variance with underlying feelings concerning Jewishness [the human universalist/Jewish        chauvinist tension]. It is doubtful whether many individuals, Jewish or Gentile, can        completely avoid incorporating our society's stereotype of the Jew. The point is
       that the authoritarian Jew accepts the stereotype and recasts it to meet the
       circumstance of his Jewishness; the nonauthoritarian Jew rejects its validity,
       fights its existence within himself, and is sometimes ridden by guilt when he
       unable to do so completely." [ADLESON, J., 1960, p. 479]

     Zalman Posner, in championing the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitcher religious world view and bemoaning the fact that there are too many secular Jews who have been misguided by concepts of human universalism, addresses the religious root in the conflict between "Christian" identity and Jewry's traditionally separatist, and intolerant, core:

     "I suggest that the American Jew conceives of religion and discusses it in
     Christian terms. He grapples with religious difficulties, because
     a Jew must examine Judaism, but he does so with Christian categories. His
conflict
     is not necessarily a Jewish one, but one of reconciling divergent viewpoints,
     the Jewish and the Christian, that were never intended to be reconciled, for
     they represent thoroughly different values." [POSNER, Z., p. 31]

     Stephen Steinlight, a former American Jewish Committee official, observes that

     "Jews regularly identify with 'belief in social justice' as the second most important
     factor in their Jewish identity; it is trumped only by a 'sense of peoplehood.' It
also
     explains the long Jewish involvement in and flirtation with Marxism. But it is
     fair to say that Jewish universalistic tendencies and tribalism have always existed
     in an uneasy dialectic. We are at once the most open of peoples and one second
     to none in intensity of national feeling. Having made this important distinction, it

     
must be admitted that the essence of the process of my [Jewish] nationalist training
     was to inculcate the belief that the primary division in the world was between 'us'

     
and 'them.' Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang
     those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was      meant to reside." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
     
     "The American Jew,"says Charles Liebman, "is torn between two sets of values -- those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival. Those values appear to me to be incompatible." [LIEBMAN, C., THE AMBIVALENT ..., p. vii; QUOTED IN O'BRIEN, 2000] As Paul Cowan once underscored about his renewed Jewish identity, and the distinctness between that and being American: "Until 1976, when I was thirty-six, I had always identified as an American Jew. Now I am an American and a Jew. I live at once in the years 1982 and 5743, the Jewish year in which I am publishing this book." [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 3]

     "Every prayer and ritual observance in Judaism,” says Arthur Koestler, "proclaims membership to an ancient race, which automatically separates the Jew from the racial and historic past of the people whose midst he lives." [KOESTLER, p. 287]  "Above all," says rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "the otherness of Jewish law as something given by God and interpreted by authoritative rabbis runs counter to the fundamental thought of modernity." [SACKS, J. p. 157] "Traditional views of the Gentile and the fear of anti-Semitism persist," wrote Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen in 1990, ".... This sense of estrangement from the non-Jew and fear of the non-Jew remain not only for Israelis and not only for those most deeply committed to the Jewish tradition." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 40]

     Edward Bernard Glick notes his people's tradtional identity like this:

     "The Jewish people (as the American dictionary calls them), dos yiddische folk
     (as Yiddish speakers refer to themselves), and am yisrael or ha'am ha'yehudi
     (as Hebrew speakers refer to the concept) denote a transnational, multilingual,
     historical, and religious group which professes a oneness, a unity, a whole, a
     solidarity, and a partnership that predates by millenia the modern Jewish state.
     The concept applies to all Jews in the world, whether they realize it or not,
     whether they want it or not, and whether they they like it or not. For Jewish
     peoplehood is Judaism, which is a religion in the gentile sense. And the proof
     of this is that no other religious group in the world so steadily and so steadfastly
     calls itself a people. Do the multifarous denominations of American Protestantism,

    
concerned as they may be with the fate of foreign Protestants, call themselves the      Methodist people, the Baptist people, the Episcopalian people, or the Presbyterian
     people? Do American Catholics ... call themselves the Catholic people, even though      catholic is a synonym for universal? Do American Muslims, American Hindus, and      American Buddhists use the word in reference to their creeds? No." [GLICK, E.,      1982, p.  125]

      As large numbers of Jews left the hearts of big cities over the years, in 1959 Rabbi Albert Gordon's study called Jews in Suburbia noted that "Jews seldom come to know non-Jews any better in suburbia than they did in the big city ... To what extent is this condition the result of Jewish self-segregation? Scrutinizing each of the communities in this study with this question in mind, I discovered first of all that ... their closest friendships are reserved for other Jews who have the same community, class, synagogual and organizational interests. This primary friendship is natural -- and characteristic of every kind of suburb." [GORDON, A., p. 170]  Arthur Hertzberg notes that in post-World War II America, "even those Jews who affirmed neither religious nor ethnic identity admitted that they were most comfortable with other Jews. Even the most 'anti-Jewish' Jews reported that at least four out of five of their friends were Jews. This was true even of people of Jewish origin who had converted to one of the branches of Christianity. Jewish businessmen and professionals ... did business much of the time with Americans of all origins and persuasions. They lunched often with their customers or clients, but they went home to have dinner and play cards, or to play golf on weekends, or to go to the theater or symphony, with other Jews." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 325]
 
     "In one study," noted Susan Schneider in the 1980s, "78% of the Jews (as compared to 14% of Protestants) say that they have 'regular interactions' with at least five households of [their] relatives. What may be a uniquely Jewish way of keeping the kinship ties is the 'cousins' club,' meeting regularly to create family networks that reinforce every member's sense of belonging, of having a reference group or 'home room' even in adulthood." [SCHNEIDER, p. 265] "Jews appear to be, by origin and authentic nature, a tribe," says Jewish author Eric Kahler, "a primordial social structure and hence, in spite of their dispersion the closest related of historical communities, closer related among each other than the locally associated members of a modern nation." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 10-11]
 
     By scholarly -- or any other -- accounts, the Jewish tradition of a clannish collectivism and communal self-promotive unity -- religiously or otherwise -- endures for most Jews today. "The American Jewish community is cohesive," wrote Alan Zuckerman in 1991, "... Because most American Jews occupy distinctive niches in the general social, economic, and political structure of the United States, each Jew makes decisions about friends, husband or wife, neighbors, workmates, and political associates from a set of persons, most of whom are Jews... [ZUCKERMAN, p. 15] ... The ties of residential concentration and social class place the American Jewish community into a distinctive niche in the general society." [ZUCKERMAN, p. 22] "The community of class and status among Jews," says Calvin Goldscheider, [and] occupational concentration and educational achievement at high levels [results] in [Jewish] social bonds, economic networks, and common lifestyles and interests ... [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 135].. . The common assumption that increased levels of education and occupation would lead to assimilation of the American Jewish community [into mainstream society] ... seems to be unfounded. An examination of the empirical evidence has pointed to the very opposite conclusion. The uniqueness of the stratification profile and the distinctive social mobility patterns of American Jews mark Jews off from others and binds Jews to each other." [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 136]  "The commonality of class and status among Jews," agrees Esther Wilder, "is distinctive and results in social bonds, economic networks, common lifestyles and interests." [WILDER, 6-96]
 
     "In America as elsewhere," noted Benjamin Ginsberg in 1994, "... Jews are outsiders who are often more successful than their hosts ... And, to make matters worse, Jews often, secretly or not so secretly, conceive themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to their neighbors." [GINZBURG, p. 8] "To be a Jew," wrote Eugene Borowitz in the 1970s," means to have a bond with every other Jew -- and somehow know how to find him." [SILBERMAN, p. 76] "In social intercourse with other Jews," says Theodore Reik, "informality and familiarity form a kind of inner security, a 'we-feeling.' They know each other and there are not many things which need to be explained. Meeting and speaking with other Jews is accompanied by the feeling that they are 'my kind of people.' It is what [Sigmund] Freud calls 'the clear awareness of an inner identity, the secret of the same inner construction.'" [REIK, T., 1962, p. 228-229]
 
     Early in his acting career, Marlon Brando recalls walking with a Jewish friend in New York City:
 
     "There was a woman in front of us with blond hair wearing a mink
     coat and we were talking about her, when Caroline said, 'She's
     Jewish.' I asked, 'How do you know?' She answered, 'Well, it's
     because ... I don't know, she's just Jewish.' I said, 'You mean to
     say, just because she has blond hair and a mink --" She interrupted,
     'Look, I'm a Jew, and I know what Jews are like from the front,
     back, side or top.' 'Well, how can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew?'
     She replied, 'Well, you have to be Jewish to know that.' I was
     stunned, and I thought Caroline had remarkable powers of
     perception." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 75]
 
     Erich Kahler recalls and incident involving a fellow Jew (poet Richard Beer-Hofmann) in Berlin:
 
     "His face was wrapped in a woolen scarf [against the cold] so that
     only his eyes could be seen. An old orthodox Jew in his caftan came
     down the stairs and stopped him. 'The gentleman is one of us (Der
     Herr ist einer von uns),' he said to Beer-Hofmann, 'he will tell me
     how I can get to the Nollendorfplatz.' The eyes alone were enough
     to reveal a Jew to a Jew." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 6]

     Former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel notes the following in his autobiography:

      "The best reporters and editors normally have no race, sex, or religion. They
      may charm or muscle their way into strange places, but they try not to THINK
      male or female, black or Jewish. Still, there always comes a time for exceptions.
      I remember reliving the shudders of refugee life at the sight of Hungarians trudging       across a frozen frontier swamp. I never totally banished that twinge of smug American       security when interviewing high-ranking Germans. And there's no denying the       conspiratorial bond that suddenly appeared when an old man on a park bench in Kiev       whispered, BIST AH YID? Are you a Jew? was a question often put to me, and
      with decidedly different inflections. In Communist countries, it came from Jews
      who meant thereby to ask whether they could trust me with seditious conversation.
      In Israel, it was asked to discover whether I would ever put my feelings for the Jewish       state ahead of my journalistic mission. Now that I had charge of editorials at the       Times, the question was usually hurled with contempt; I was obviously a Jew, but
      in the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy one for daring to criticize the Israeli       government. So whenever I turned to the subject of Israel, there was no escaping
      my skin." [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 397]
 
      "Jewish civilization should have vanished a long time ago," says Henry Feingold, "that it did not and does not may also be part of Jewish exceptionalism. It may well be that Judaism is governed by different rules ... Jews are a subgroup in this dynamic society; but they are also more Jewish, as measured by the concern for Jewish people throughout the world." [FEINGOLD, p. 52] "90% [of American Jews] claim to feel 'very close' or 'fairly close' to other Jews," noted Alan Zuckerman in 1991, " ... Even when they select non-Jews [as spouses and friends], most Jews have strong ties which pull them back to the Jewish community." [ZUCKERMAN, p. 27] "The Jews," noted Jonathan Rieder in his study of Jews and Italians in a section of Brooklyn, "had a pronounced feeling of ethnic honor, another sign of their willingness to invest in loyalties beyond the nuclear family. The articulateness of Jewish identity, and the capacity for immersion in the collective experience of Jewish suffering, ran contrary to the muteness of Canarasie Italians about their ethnicity." [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 46]
 
       In 1993 Joel Kotkin noted that "an estimated 50 per cent or more of American Jews send their children to an ethnic school, and over three-quarters of young men undergo the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony. In contrast, counterpart systems promoting